when dinosaurs ruled the earth

you think things are bad now, cut back 80 million years ago and realize that los angeles was underwater. visualize those warm inland seas covering your favorite restaurant and your favorite places to shop and you start to see that things could be worse.

your dirty apartment now, those roaches who don't even pretend to be afraid of you these days; looking blankly at you from pots and pans and the mirror of the bathroom sink? go back in time and problems escalate. their giant insect relatives, buzzing in the hot, oxygen thick air of prehistory, they'd only make you feel worse. welcome to a life where the best you can hope for is a flow of tree sap to trap your worries in stasis for a few eons.

little differences between now and then, constrasting moments in time. a drunken friend threatening to kill himself on hollywood boulevard. a pteranodon stretching its wings over what will one day be kansas. my shirtless neighbor, only 5 or 6, showing off a glowing skull he got at the dollar store. hadrosaurs nesting among the murky grasses of a swamp in ancient asia. a room mate drives off to denver, all remaining hope ahead of him and it's like how animals have always run towards the things important to them, or away from what scared them, and you see how things tend to repeat themselves.

example: tar pits formed near miracle mile at some point, and a mastodon fell in, and attracted predators from miles who then got stuck, one after another, dying to get that easy meal. later, 9 million bc, all those dire wolves and sabertooth tigers are long dead, but a native american woman ends up a fossil in the same tar pits, her mistakes guiding her to that familiar result. there are lessons to be learned here, but they're predictably lost under all that sucking oil. can you think of an original gesture anymore? is anyone learning anything?

the wind blows fires across the city, and it blows trees apart and it blows a haunted house that took two weeks to build into pieces and the whole world used to be a single continent and look what happened to it. if things are bad now with the weather and the earthquakes and your broken heart, what were they back then? dust from an asteroid blocked out the sun and froze everything but today its just that girl you like and maybe things could be a lot worse but does it matter? what did a cave man's problems ever mean to you? nothing's relevant, but it's all relative, and maybe another ice age is just what you need this year to get your life together, for us to get things started and stop doing less than the bugs in the living room.

and somewhere down the line, in a futurist's dream, the bugs are still there, their slow cell cycles surviving in the radiation that wiped people away forever, and there are new problems just like the old problems and at best you hope that within all of this someone's figured something out and maybe life will at least be less melodramatic for the bugs than it was for us or dinosaurs or wooly mammoths or even those cave men; painting the shapes of their hands on rock walls, their lives summed up in drawings of simple figures holding spears and torches and running after things that were important to them.



-blh/2007